NOTES for Luk 16:10

Faith and faithfulness are words with the same root not only in Russian, but also in the languages of the Bible. Faith in the biblical sense always implies faithfulness. If Christian faith is what opens to us the possibility of union with Christ and, consequently, the path to eternal life, then it is precisely faithfulness to this faith that keeps us on this path, while unfaithfulness casts us into the outer darkness. Thus, our entire destiny is determined by the acceptance of God's salvation through faith and faithfulness.

But is it possible to combine faithfulness in this extremely important direction of life with unfaithfulness in something partial, secondary? A joke from Soviet times comes to mind: “Today you cheated on your wife, and tomorrow — on the Motherland!” — the words of Jesus show that He would hardly have treated this exclusively as a joke.

Faithfulness is a general attribute of the human personality, not so much innate as it is cultivated and developed, and the level of development of this attribute is reflected in all aspects of human behavior. How many times has one had to observe with sadness how people who are unfaithful to their word then turn out to be unfaithful in friendship, in marriage, in their belonging to the Church.